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Office for Mac 2008 was launched at the Macworld Expo last January. Though it offered native Intel performance and compatibility with the new XML-based Office file formats, it also lost Visual Basic for Applications scripting and support for EndNote and Solver. Microsoft Mac BU's Geoff Price has taken a look back at the improvements 2008 brought to Office, and looks forward to more for 2009.

Office 2008 took four years to produce, due in no small part to transitioning to Xcode to create a universal binary that runs natively on Intel Macs. The new version also added support for the new Office Open XML file formats (that, from my experience, no one is using just yet). But over this past year, the Office for Mac team has delivered five updates, and announced updated compatibility with EndNote and Solver. For serious Excel users everywhere, the team also announced that VBA would be coming back in the next major release of Office.

And speaking of the future, Price also commented that the team is already well into development of the next version of Office for Mac. In addition to growing the engineering team, Price is refocusing the group toward efficiency and quality and less on "creative" features. Porting code to Cocoa is also a priority, especially since it's the only way to enable 64-bit support under Mac OS X, and my guess is that it will likely be the only way to take advantage of some of the architectural improvements coming to Snow Leopard. There are definitely new features coming, but I know many users that would just be happy with improved performance and ease of use.

Price wrote that VBA running natively, as well as other tech demos, have been given to the team, "which we'll be sharing sooner rather than later." Hopefully the Mac BU will have some enticing things to show off two weeks from now at Macworld Expo 2009.